by David Gilman
And then the shooting started.
‘Drive!’ said the crew’s leader. The command was sharp but lacked any sense of panic. Eddie knew where he had to go: the route had been planned in advance. But the killing? He hadn’t bargained for that. That wasn’t part of the deal. A dead man slaughtered behind the wheel and a bound and gagged hostage in the back of the van. A kid running down the street and Eddie didn’t even know whether they had gunned the lad down. The game had escalated big time. The scare factor was up 100 per cent. The part of the human brain that had controlled man’s instinct to survive since Stone Age hunters fought mammoths kicked in. He did what he was paid to do and accelerated fast, expertly getting into the traffic. In less than two minutes he bypassed the slip road to Hammersmith and carried on for the flyover. He shifted the gears, causing no fuss to other drivers by cutting in. He was just another van driver in a hurry. The traffic cameras would pick them up soon enough: in five hundred yards, when Eddie would earn his money. He changed up a gear. No one spoke. No sound came from the injured man. The van stormed across the flyover. His instructions had been to head in the opposite direction to the ambush but he couldn’t do that from the ambush site because of the median barrier. The skill to get the van travelling in the opposite direction was what Eddie was being paid for.
The A4 continued over and down the raised roadway and became Talgarth Road. The next junction, in the dip of the road, allowed no right turn to the Barons Court Underground Station, so to go back the way Eddie had come on the opposite side of the dual carriageway would have meant turning left at the traffic lights into Gliddon Road, stopping, turning round and then taking the van back across the junction to legally turn right on to the A4 and drive in the desired direction. That would take time.
As he came over the brow of the flyover he saw the traffic lights flick to amber. Cars sped across the junction not wishing to be caught on a long red light. The amber turned red with no waiting cars on the start line. Eddie’s concentration was intense. He slipped into a mental zone where nothing else existed. The men, the ambush, the guns and the fear: none of that mattered any more. He was as steady as a plumb line. The man next to him cast a quick glance to check that the driver was not frozen in apprehension. He wasn’t. Eddie had many variables to consider. He needed a few vital seconds to swing the cumbersome van in a tight U-turn and not collide with anyone or anything. He had weighted the back of the van with strapped-down bags of cement to give the rear wheels traction. The men in the rear of the van knew what to expect because he had briefed them. They had strapped themselves to the van’s metal struts.
He slowed to forty miles an hour, kicked in the clutch and brought the van down to third gear. Checking his mirrors both sides, he saw there was enough distance from the following cars. Praying the lights would not change now and bring the traffic head-on, with a final smooth drop of the gear lever into second, he pressed his foot flat on the accelerator, pushing the rev counter past the 3,500 mark. With the engine protesting, he gripped the steering wheel with his right hand at the nine o’clock position, swung hard all the way around to six o’clock while at the same time his left hand heaved up the handbrake. The rear wheels locked and the van tail-ended towards the traffic lights. For a few heart-stopping seconds, it seemed as if the van would roll. As rubber gripped and squealed, Eddie let in the clutch and gave the engine its power. Smoke poured from the tyres but then the van was heading west. Now he put his foot down because traffic cameras would have caught that stunt and there would be calls being placed to traffic police and the one thing a Ford Transit van could not do, even this one with its modified engine, was outrun a BMW police pursuit car.
The man next to him had the good grace to exhale and swear at the same time. The killers in the back laughed and said something in a language Eddie didn’t understand. But it felt good nonetheless. For that brief moment, he deluded himself that this tight-knit crew of hardened men had accepted him.
On the other side of the road, the journey’s waypoint loomed into view. The star-encrusted blue dome of the Russian Orthodox Church in Chiswick meant he was getting close to his turn. Eddie knew it well. The Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God and the Royal Martyrs was a constant sight on his daily travels to and from the city, and it told him he needed to get across into the left-hand lane. The start of the M4 motorway lay ahead and his instructions were to get down the slip road before it and avoid the next set of cameras. He flipped the indicator, the van slowed into the tight left-hand bend. It picked up speed once on to the wider A205 road heading towards Kew Bridge and as he approached a railway bridge he swung the van into a narrow lane on the right-hand side. An industrial yard of blue-stacked self-storage containers was set back, its mesh wire fencing obscured by overgrown bushes. The lane was a perfect place to swap vehicles. On the opposite side, an overgrown embankment tumbled down to Kew Bridge Station, which meant no one would see anything untoward because they were below the road. The nondescript white Renault van was parked facing down the lane where it had been left at six o’clock that morning. Eddie swung into the yard’s gates and quickly reversed. Two of the men jumped out, opened the rear doors of the Renault and then the three ambushers clambered inside, roughly manhandling their captive, by which time Eddie was in the Renault cab. The Russian gang leader, for that is what Eddie had determined his nationality to be, twisted a timer device on a large plastic container full of petrol, threw it into the Transit and slammed closed its doors. Fifteen seconds later, as the Renault drove out of sight down the lane, they heard the rush of air and explosion as the Transit burst into flames. A shortcut led them back on to the A4 dual carriageway. Eddie’s heart skipped a beat. They were passing Brentford and he thought of Shelley who would be putting the kettle on about now and sneaking out the chocolate digestives from the fridge door. He smiled to himself. Almost home, love. Almost done with this crew. And then they’d be off. There was no rush now. The van glided into the roundabout traffic and turned towards Heathrow Airport. After two and a half miles the second waypoint appeared in the form of the Syon Clinic on his left. Eddie swung into the opposite feeder lane, waited for the lights and then turned the van back in the direction they had come. Two hundred metres further along he turned down a narrow industrial track, so narrow it was barely possible in places to squeeze the van past the big parked trucks that hogged the roadside. It was appropriately named Transport Avenue. Straight ahead was a cement factory and nearby a scrap-metal recycling yard. It was noisy and he suspected that would help mask any sounds the captured man would make. Of one thing he felt certain. That poor bastard had something these men needed and they were going to hurt him to get it. He stopped the van next to some locked gates that, once opened, exposed a boarded-up semi-derelict brick building that was part of a disused industrial area. The large contractor’s board declared: ‘MALCOLM & SONS DEMOLITION. DANGER – KEEP OUT. CONDEMNED BUILDING UNSAFE’. Alongside the warning was more modest signage stating it had been ‘Sold (subject to contract)’. Once the van rolled into the abandoned yard and the gates were closed no one outside would see or hear anything.
Eddie Roman let the men haul their victim away. He lit a cigarette and noticed that there was a slight tremor in his hand. Home was less than fifteen minutes away. He asked the God he had never believed in to protect him long enough to return there.
5
Within an hour of Lewis’s murder and Jeremy Carter’s abduction, the well-rehearsed standard operating procedure for a Major Incident swung into place. Following the pattern established in London and many other world cities that had experienced terrorist attacks, the events in London W6 would, privately at least, until the investigation proved otherwise, be treated as terror-related. Three cordons had been established. The first secured the immediate area surrounding Carter’s car in Weltje Road and the crime scene. They established a second cordon extending from the start of the road. The third and outer cordon nudged into the A4 approach lane and at the other
end of the ambush site at King Street, where traffic was stopped and forced through a diversionary chicane. The entrance to Weltje Road became the cordon access point. All parked cars on the road were quarantined, no public pedestrian access was permitted and the residents were confined to their houses. Borough police commanders were briefed as scene-of-crime officers erected a white tent covering Carter’s car and the dead man who still lay sprawled in the driver’s seat. Empty cartridge cases were identified and marked as evidence. With an efficiency born from years of experience the Forensic Investigation Specialist Crime officers, experts in major incidents such as terrorist attacks, murder and armed robbery, plied their trade while uniform and plainclothes officers conducted door-to-door interviews. The media was herded away behind barriers at the entry point to the ambush road.
An official-looking car passed a police outrider blocking access to Weltje Road from traffic approaching along King Street. The man who sat in the back showed his credentials and was waved closer to the edge of the cordon. The car had barely stopped when an agitated police officer gestured it to move on. The moment the stuttering blue light was flashed behind the car’s radiator grill the officer stepped back and, like the policeman before him, checked the passenger’s proffered identification. The man in his fifties who alighted from the car had the look of a career politician. His wiry grey hair was groomed, the standard-issue politician’s charcoal suit hung well on a slim athletic frame, the similarly coloured overcoat was casually unbuttoned. He strode confidently and with an easy graceful gait towards the borough police commander and investigating officers. At first they did not recognize him but when he extended his leather-encased identity card the uniformed borough commander’s brow furrowed. Such an incident would normally be of immediate interest to MI5, the Security Service, not a suit from MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service.
‘Mr Maguire, Commander Pickering is at Bedford Park with a firearms team.’
Maguire nodded; Pickering was the counter-terrorism commander and the two men had already spoken by telephone. Maguire’s eyes scanned the scene of police tape cordons, the flood of uniformed officers and the white-suited forensic officers. Photographs were being taken and blue-boiler-suited Met policemen were conducting a fingertip search of the ambush site.
‘What information do we have?’ said Maguire.
‘A van was parked just beyond the curve in the road,’ said the senior officer, pointing to the choke point. ‘The shooters were dressed as highway maintenance workers. The vehicle and tools were stolen from the company’s north London yard two days ago. There are no CCTV cameras on this road but we are checking traffic cameras on the approach along the Chiswick High Road and their escape route down the A4.’
‘Is there a CAP?’ he asked.
The borough commander extended her arm towards the inner cordon and the common approach path. ‘This way.’ Like every crime scene, this one had restricted access allowing only essential personnel to cross the inner cordon. A young female police crime-scene manager nodded as her senior officer approached with Maguire.
‘Ma’am.’
Maguire signed her ledger as she booked the time he entered. When he left she would book him out. Time and personnel control was essential to the effective running of a crime scene. Maguire stepped towards the white-tented area. A forensic officer greeted him.
‘Can you show me?’ said Maguire.
The officer turned his tablet around and swiped long shots and close-up images of the bullet-punctured windscreen, the dead man and the items discovered in the car. A blood-smeared rugby ball and a mobile phone lay in the rear seat well. ‘Given what we could see on the mobile phone it appears to belong to the boy and with the rugby ball it indicates that the child was in the car at the time of the shooting.’
‘Nothing else?’ said Maguire. ‘Any sign of the boy being shot? Any blood down the street?’
‘No. And initial tests indicate we have only the driver’s blood and a smear on the floor of the car behind his seat which might belong to the abducted man.’
Maguire knew that whoever had staged the attack would not have given a second thought to killing a child. Carter’s son had either escaped or been taken.
‘Ballistics?’
‘We’ll know soon enough but 5.56-mm empty cases are everywhere.’
That suggested an assault rifle, and if the rounds were the enhanced variety with a hardened steel core then they had been expecting the car to be bulletproof. They weren’t taking any chances. ‘Enhanced rounds?’ said Maguire.
‘The lab will tell us soon enough,’ the man replied.
Maguire nodded his thanks and turned to the borough commander. ‘No sign of the boy?’
‘Nothing. He must have been terrified. We’ll have his photograph on all the news along with that of his father.’
‘Stepfather,’ Maguire corrected her. He cast an experienced eye over the ambush site. The choke point was as near perfect as you could expect. Blocked cars, narrow street, bend in the road. No way out for the victims. Assault rifles probably meant specialist weapons. Determining what rifles and exact ammunition were used might help to find what country the killers hailed from. Taking his leave of the borough commander he felt one thing was certain. The operation had been carried out with professional expertise. They knew their target and they had taken Carter for a specific reason. It was no random grudge killing of a banker. Jeremy Carter had information his abductors wanted. And that was what worried Maguire.
*
Maguire’s driver retraced the route Carter, his son and Lewis had probably taken from Bedford Park. At the house a strong police presence was obvious. The junction of Woodstock Road and Rupert Road was blocked and a cordon extended three hundred metres in all directions. The threat level had been increased on the orders of the senior officer in charge of the Counter-Terrorism Branch and a half-dozen CTSFO armed officers stood strategically placed. Two of them barred entry to the crossroads as a more lightly armed Met officer checked the identity of the car that drew to a halt. A third officer checked Maguire’s credentials. A tall, suited civilian carrying a police phone was standing nearby with three senior uniformed officers as he briefed them on the situation. Commander Tom Pickering saw the car draw to a halt and excused himself from his briefing. He waved the car forward and waited in the driveway to Carter’s house. Maguire climbed out of the back of the car and extended his hand in greeting. He needed no special clearance.
‘Hello, Tom,’ said Maguire affably, glancing at one of the heavily armed CTSFO officers who stood with another at the rear entrance to the house. A quick look upward told him a sniper team was in place on the roof and were he a betting man he’d have put a hefty wager on there being more than one. If this was a concerted terrorist attack and a suicide bomber attempted to break through the cordons at the end of the streets they would be dead before they made it halfway. There was unlikely to be anything the counter-terrorism commander had failed to cover.
‘Mr Maguire,’ said Pickering in greeting. ‘The commissioner said you were on your way. Everything here is locked down. Five is on the case.’
The Security Service, known as MI5, is the nation’s key counter-intelligence service. Collecting and analysing covert intelligence lies at its heart. Maguire needed them onside because of his own connection with the abducted Carter. He had already spoken to his opposite number at MI5, who’d offered complete co-operation. In the current climate of terrorist threats, inter-agency collaboration was vital, but Maguire was a different breed of intelligence officer. He was the keeper of a treasure trove of secrets and not always as forthcoming as his counterparts would like. However, he had sufficient authority to give them the official version of the two-finger salute. And he didn’t kid himself. Turf wars still existed. But what outsiders did not realize was that the Service was not as bureaucratic as they imagined. In reality it was a collegiate meritocracy. People depended on each other and secrets were hermetically sealed. Maguire was an e
x-army officer and his exploits when he served in special forces many years before made him feel at home in MI6, where those responsible for operational territories are still referred to as ‘robber barons’ – an old-fashioned sobriquet that suited Maguire rather well. He recalled one astute observer of the Service referring to the members of its arcane and layered organization as sorcerers who knew the secrets of its Kabbalistic demonology.
